Is it possible to use the second LAN port on the freeNAS as a direct transfer to PC??

[BCrippsy38]

I download movies and shows frequently since I ditched cable, but after getting freeNAS up and running the transfer speeds aren't what I had hoped. Is there a way to use the second LAN port on the freeNAS to connect directly to the PC I download on? Or is there another way to make the transfers faster?
Thanks for the help in advance

 

[Brand]

When asking for ways to make your transfers faster it is usually a good idea to mention what your current transfer speeds are and what type of speeds that you are expecting. Here are a few suggestion.

Jumbo frames
CAT 5e or greater ethernet cabling
Gigabit network interface cards
Gigabit switch
Update firmware on router/switch

 

[BCrippsy38]

I understand about being more specific but I was hoping to have my first question answered before I jumped into the specifics. Was wondering if anyone had their freeNAS server directly connected to a windows PC via Ethernet or fire-wire to make frequent transfers adding files to the server?
As far as my specifics are: I'm getting about 8-10MB/s hardwired and about 5MB/s when using wireless N. Both PCs have Gigabit ports as well as the router. Router is a Dlink-825.
Any further help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[William Grzybowski]

The first thing to determinate is how fast the storage is locally...

like: dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/volume/tempfile bs=1m count=500

Are you using ZFS? or UFS? How much ram?

 

[BCrippsy38]

Currently I have existing volumes in NTFS and a fresh volume in ZFS that I am trying to transfer over to so I can reformat the NTFS to ZFS. The freeNAS server is running an AMD duel core 3.0GHz and 4GB of RAM.
I don't follow with "dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/volume/tempfile bs=1m count=500"

 

[William Grzybowski]

This is a command to run in SSH as root (google for more info)

What disks are you using? Did you check the 4k sector size while creating the ZFS volume?

 

[BCrippsy38]

Using SATA drives, did not check the 4k when created volume.

 

[BCrippsy38]

if I run SSH would it be slower because its encrypted?

 

[b1ghen]

if I run SSH would it be slower because its encrypted?

No, it's just your connection that is encrypted, the command is executed locally on the Freenas system

 

[b1ghen]

The first thing to determinate is how fast the storage is locally...

like: dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/volume/tempfile bs=1m count=500

I think creating just a 500MB file might not be large enough, it might be cached completely in RAM. Just for curiosity I ran this on my server and got:

"dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/volume/tempfile bs=1m count=500"

524288000 bytes transferred in 0.394073 secs (1330433669 bytes/sec)

That is a whopping 1.3 GB/s which is not correct for my 6 drive RAIDZ2, if I made a 5GB file on the other hand:

"dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/volume/tempfile bs=1m count=5000"

5242880000 bytes transferred in 21.456230 secs (244352340 bytes/sec)

I get 244MB/s which sounds a lot more plausible.


But yes I agree that examining the speed of the disk storage locally is step number one here.

 

[BCrippsy38]

Ok Ill give that a shot tonight. Is there a local command to transfer folders between volumes I can use?

 

[BCrippsy38]

in the mean time is it possible to configure the second ethernet port of the NAS server to connect to a windows PC directly with a cross over cable?

 

[BCrippsy38]

i dont have a dev/zero directory what am i supposed to change it to and how do i find it?

 

[BCrippsy38]

I was able to run rsync between a ntfs sata and a zfs sata drive. Transfered 2 4GB files, speed was about 12MB/s. Any ideas why its so slow? could to be because of the two different partition types?
Mtherboard: ASUS M2N32-SLI
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ Windsor 3.0GHz
Memory: CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (4 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel
HDD1: SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series HD501LJ 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive
Hdd2: SAMSUNG EcoGreen F4 HD204UI 2TB SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

 

[dannyb78]

If your pc have a second lan I suggest you to assign to your lan 2 in pc and in nas another class of IP (eg. lan1 192.168.1.0/24 lan2 192.168.2.0/24) and connect all via the same switch.
if you think the problem is the switch (not gigabit switch, od defected one) so replace it!!
if you dont have gigabit nic and switch that's your problem, not the config.

but the first thing is test your drive locally. your disks are not very fast, but you should have not less than 60MB/s, I think that 80MB/s should be the right local speed. if not you've got a problem with hardware o hardware driver or filsystem or somewath related

Actually I have 2GB nics on my NAS and my transfer rate is about 100MB/s with wired PC with 1GB nic card and high quality GB ethernet switch.

 

[BCrippsy38]

I don't believe it is the hardware, the motherboard LAN is 1000Mbps as well as the router (D-Link dir-825)

 

[dannyb78]

so test the drives locally ;)
you can find the name of your device (wich you must substitute to "zero") in GUI -> storage -> view disks of the pool.

if you have more than 1 pc try to transfer files between your pc, to test the speed of your network.

anyhow if you dint think the problem is the network why use direct connection? this just skip the switch, and exclude trafic generated by other PCs (but not disk throughputh required by other PCs!!)

 

[BCrippsy38]

"dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/volume/tempfile bs=1m count=5000"
so where is /dev/zero coming from? is that one of the HDDs like ada0s1?
and /mnt/volume/ is that the same syntax or is volume replaced with the same HDD.

my reasoning for direct connection is so I can upload content to the server directly while still having the NAS accessible to the rest of the network. That is if there was any advantage in doing it that way, speed wise.

 

[dannyb78]

hope this can helps you
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)

 

[b1ghen]

so where is /dev/zero coming from? is that one of the HDDs like ada0s1?

No, /dev/zero explained, (unfirtuantely wikipedia is down today because of SOPA):

/dev/zero is a pseudo-device file, but it actually produces a stream of nulls (binary zeros, not the ASCII kind). Output written to /dev/zero disappears, and it is fairly difficult to actually read the nulls emitted there, though it can be done with od or a hex editor. The chief use of /dev/zero is creating an initialized dummy file of predetermined length intended as a temporary swap file.

and /mnt/volume/ is that the same syntax or is volume replaced with the same HDD.

/mnt/volume where "volume" is the name of your zpool, if the zpool is called "tank" then run this command:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/tank/tempfile bs=1m count=5000

this will write a file full of zeros about 5GB in size named /mnt/tank/tempfile

the dd command will output the time it took to write the file and the speed.